Financial Reform Bill

Last week the US Senate passed the Financial Reform Bill. After decades of Neoliberal deregulation, the legislation intends to re-regulate the free-floating financial system which was at the root of the 2008 crisis. Symbolically, therefore, the bill signals the end of the postmodern (late-capitalist) years of unbridled lending and unfettered trading. As CNN Money aptly summarises, the legislation:

‘… establishes a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that could write new rules to protect consumers from unfair or abusive practices in mortgages and credit cards; …creates a new council of regulators that would set new standards for how much cash banks must keep on hand to prevent them from ever triggering a financial crisis; …puts new limits on Wall Street banks’ speculative bets for their own accounts and their ability to own hedge funds; …aims to shine a brighter light on some complex financial products, called derivatives, that are blamed for exacerbating the collapse of financial;…and inserts a middleman between trades, so that financial firms are less interconnected, to prevent the domino effect of financial firm failures in 2008.’

According to President Obama – and most, if not all, commentators tend to agree – the bill is ‘the toughest financial reform since the Great Depression.’ Still, however, as the NY Times writes, ‘the financial industry won some important victories, even if they face significantly heightened regulation. They fought off some of the toughest restrictions on their ability to invest their own funds. Most significantly, they thwarted an attempt to make them give up their highly profitable derivatives trading desks.’ As so many other aspects of the metamodern, therefore, the reform is both-neither, as it both-neither fully regulates and-nor completely deregulates the financial system. For one can not return to the day and age of modernism, one cannot undo the day and age of postmodernism, one can only go beyond them.

Image: financial reform now. Courtesy ourfinancialsecurity.org.

Previous uses of the term metamodernism

We feel we need to justify our use of the term metamodernism. In a future post we will explain its etymological origin and its relationship to the Platonic/Voegelin concept of metaxis. Here we will briefly refer to some of the term’s previous uses. Although we are the first to use the term metamodernism to describe the current structure of feeling in terms of an oscillation between a modern hope and a postmodern disappointment (a mutual re-signification, if you will, of one by the other), we are not the first to use the term per se. It has been used in writings on law, politics, economics, data analysis and architecture as far back as the 1970s. Most significantly, it has been used with some frequency in literature studies. Here it has been applied in order to describe a post-modern alternative to postmodernism as presented in the works of authors as far apart as Blake and Guy Davenport. The literary theorist Alexandra Dimitrescu, for example, describes metamodernism in terms of the integration and interconnectedness of contrary approaches. We would like to stress however that our conception of metamodernism is by no means aligned to these notions, nor is it derived from them. It is in so far related to these notions that it too negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. But the function, structure and nature of the negotiation we perceive are entirely our own and, as far as we can see, wholly unrelated to the previous perceptions. Metamodernism as we conceive it does not integrate; but neither does it exclude. It oscillates. That is to say, it both-neither integrates and-nor excludes – desires a sens and-nor doubts of the sense of it all, longs and-nor laments, constructs and-nor deconstructs…

Image: Kaye Donachie, Early Morning Hours of the Night (2003). Courtesy Maureen Paley